Title: The Stolen Kingdom
Series: The Stolen Kingdom, #1
Author: Bethany Atazadeh
My Rating: 5/5 stars
Purchase: Amazon / Barnes & Noble (also available on Apple, Kobo, and more)
Synopsis (taken from Amazon): How can she protect her kingdom, if she can’t protect herself?
Princess Arie never expected to manifest a Jinni’s Gift. When she begins to hear the thoughts of those around her, she hides it to the best of her ability. But to her dismay, the Gift is growing out of control.
When a neighboring king tries to force her hand in marriage and steal her kingdom, discovery becomes imminent. Just one slip could cost her throne. And her life.
A lamp, a heist, and a Jinni hunter’s crew of thieves are her only hope for removing this Gift–and she must remove it before she’s exposed. Or die trying.
The Stolen Kingdom is a loose “Aladdin” retelling. Set in a world that humans share with Mermaids, Dragons, and the elusive Jinni, this isn’t the fairytale you remember…
MY REVIEW: 5/5 STARS
Ach, this book was SO. GOOD. Then again, I knew it would be a new favourite from the moment I read the first pages of the free chapters you get when you sign up for Bethany Atazadeh’s newsletter. Those first few pages are enough to hook you into a fantasy world that’s richly described and fleshed out, with fascinating new races and types of magic. Usually I don’t like magical races in fantasy, you know how they often feel shoehorned into the story for the sake of it? But the ones in the Stolen Kingdom world fit there so naturally that I never found myself feeling that way. They seemed normal and real.
I loved Arie’s authentic voice. and also KADIN. Their slow, non-insta-love romance fit their characters so perfectly because it would’ve been out of character for either of them to jump into a relationship quickly. That ending, though — UGHHHH. Way to get me to buy the next book! 😉 While that ending was a bit frustrating, though, I was actually relieved that they weren’t tied up in a neat bow, because considering the development of events up until then it wouldn’t have felt natural, it just wasn’t at that point yet. Anyways, I just loved seeing Arie’s struggle to come to terms with her Gift and learn how to live with it.
The secondary characters, too — you can really sense the care that was put into creating them. With a couple of exceptions, each character had a good-sized role to play and had a sense of individuality. I think the nature of Arie’s Gift may have had a lot to do with this. I mean, she can hear people’s thoughts, so we come to know quite a lot about each character through the way he thinks. I know that Gideon for sure I want to see more of, which is just one more reason for me to buy The Jinni Key the second I can afford it (I have been buying WAY too many books lately).
In terms of fairytale retellings, The Stolen Kingdom was simply fantastic. As the synopsis says, it’s a loose retelling, so you can’t match a lot of the events up exactly with events in the original Aladdin story. This made the reading experience more like a discovery, since I’d be wondering if and how a certain element was going to be included, and then always being delighted when it happened, and with the way it happened. It was always so original! And I can only say that the apparent ease with which it was done has made me feel insecure about my own ability to write an engaging and original retelling… 😛
There was this overall feeling that I had the whole time I was reading The Stolen Kingdom. Like, warm and comfortable and homey. I think I would describe it as the colour red. And then when I read the excerpt from The Jinni Key at the end, it felt rich and watery and nighttime-y — the colour blue. The atmosphere of each story simply permeates them both. (Also, cool thing, those colours match the colour schemes of the respective covers!) But how at-home I felt in the story is certainly the one thing that stuck with me most even after I finished.
Benita J. Thompson 